Sony Online Entertainment Admits 24.6 Million User Accounts Compromised

Things are going from bad to worse for Sony, as after the recent hacking of the PlayStation Network almost two weeks ago, Sony Online Entertainment, the company's MMO division, revealed that its servers were hacked and around 24.6 million user accounts have been compromised.

Yesterday, the Japanese company saw its PC MMO portal, Station.com, go offline, with Sony Online Entertainment admitting that it has taken it down in order to investigate an "outside intrusion."

Things quickly escalated, as SOE realized that hackers have managed to compromise the accounts of millions of users, basically anyone who played online games like DC Universe Online, Free Realms, EverQuest or EverQuest 2.

"Personal information from approximately 24.6 million SOE accounts may have been stolen, as well as certain information from an outdated database from 2007," says an SOE announcement.

"The information from the outdated database that may have been stolen includes approximately 12,700 non-U.S. credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates (but not credit card security codes), and about 10,700 direct debit records of certain customers in Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Spain."

Among the information stolen by hackers we have things like names, home and email addresses, birthdays, genders, phone numbers, login names or even passwords. From the outdated database, hackers could also extract things like bank account numbers, customer names or addresses.

"Upon discovery of this additional information, the company promptly shut down all servers related to SOE services while continuing to review and upgrade all of its online security systems in the face of these unprecedented cyber-attacks," said SOE.

The company will be notifying its users of the attack and is certain to make up for those affected by the server outage through free play time in its subscription-based MMOs.

"SOE will grant customers 30 days of additional time on their subscriptions, in addition to compensating them one day for each day the system is down," the company added.

Last week, when Sony admitted that its PlayStation Network was hacked, SOE released a statement in which it said that its servers were secure and that MMO players on the PlayStation 3 would see certain goodwill gestures be made.

Now, it seems that SOE will need to extend them to PC owners as well.